Ali vs. Inoki (9 page)

Showering without a hazmat suit was a risky proposition. It speaks to LeBell's stuntman leanings that he dared to stand under the running water in slippers.

“You could always tell when you got to the second floor,” the grappler said. “It smelled like a urinal.”

Used as the interior location for “Mighty Mick's Boxing” in the first three
Rocky
films, the gym at 318½ Main Street was filled with characters pulled from central casting. The space offered two fifteen-foot rings, side by side, and always showcased a wide variety of fighters going through their routines. Life-size cutouts of famed champions helped cover the peeling walls.

The pros sparred during the day, and anyone could get upstairs to watch. All they had to do was pay Arthur “Duke” Holloway, the large black man wearing a bowler and smoking a cigar at the top of the staircase, whatever he charged that day. Rarely was it more than a dollar to step inside the gym. From 1960 to 1977, Holloway worked for Howie Steindler, a New York expat, perhaps the Main Street Gym's greatest eccentric, who was killed in an unsolved murder in front of his home in the San Fernando Valley. Steindler's body was found in his Cadillac on the Ventura Freeway.

Steindler didn't take any bullshit, was as profane as anyone, and made boxing his life while laying down the law at a hothouse nestled between burlesque theaters. There are reasons Burgess Meredith's Mickey was modeled after Steindler, who fought as an amateur featherweight before heading west in 1942.

“You'd pass right by where Howie Steindler would have his office,” Rich Marotta said. “And you'd see him in there. He was eventually the manager of Danny ‘Little Red' Lopez. And when those guys would be training down there, I'd go down and watch. Just as a kid boxing fan. They had a little
set of bleachers you could sit in and watch the fighters. It was amazing because you could end up talking to the fighters a little bit. You were right there among them. That was another new experience.”

John Hall, a sports columnist with the
LA Times
after the paper absorbed the
Mirror
in May 1962, visited the Main Street Gym two or three afternoons a week just to talk with people. Hall and Steindler became good pals, and they shared a few drinks most afternoons.

“He had a great sense of humor that people didn't know,” Hall said of the loud manager and gym owner. “He hustled all the time. He was a hustler but I thought he was terrific. He was not perfect.”

Hall took several opportunities to speak with Ali at the Alexandria Hotel, which opened in 1906, and spent several hours chatting with the curious boxer. If Ali wasn't training he was usually standing on the hotel's busy street corner with his brother checking out women, or engaged in some sort of press.

“When Ali came in town the first time I ended up sitting next to him during lunch,” Hall recalled. “He asked all kinds of questions about Gorgeous George and Art Aragon—how they perfected the villain routine, got all the publicity and drew so well. There's a lot of Gorgeous George that rubbed off on Ali early on.

“He was really naive and trying to learn about everything. He asked a million questions.

“I didn't think he was a genius. He was street smart. Smart enough. He kept developing that act of his. It took him about three years to really get into it. He was smart enough to recite a poem, that's for sure.”

Sitting in on a session at the Main Street Gym is how Bill Caplan met Cassius Clay.

Five years after moving with his new wife to L.A. from Des Moines, Iowa, Caplan paid the bills as a frozen food broker for Birds Eye and Ore-Ida Potatoes. Boxing was where he wanted to be, though, and like everyone else Caplan had begun to hear about this heavyweight kid who had won gold at the Olympics. He took the chance to see the boxer in person at the Main Street Gym ahead of Ali's fight with Logan.

“I walk in and Ali is sparring,” Caplan said. “He's going backwards around that little ring as fast as most athletes can run forward. I never saw anything like it, his legs, and his speed. I was in awe. I guess he was about twenty years old; he was already famous and already made a mark and getting huge publicity.

“I am carrying a little red Zenith transistor radio. Because I always have been, to this day, a Dodger fanatic. I would always have the radio with me, even when I went to a movie with my wife. I'd be listening to the Dodger game while watching the movie. And transistor radios were new then. And these little red Zeniths were the best transistor radio you could buy. It was my pride and joy.

“And I'm watching Ali spar and the Dodgers had a game on the road. And he sees me listening to that radio. And when sparring was over, he was wiping the sweat off and he said, ‘What do you got there?' I said, ‘That's a radio.' And he said, ‘That little thing's a radio?' Portable radios then were much larger. They had these heavy batteries and probably weighed about 12 pounds, but they felt like they weighed
50 pounds. And this was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Yet it had great tone and everything. And he says, ‘That's a radio?'

“He comes out of the ring and says, ‘Can I see that thing?' I said, ‘Sure.' He said, ‘Can you get music on this?' I said, ‘Sure you can.' We dialed it around and got a music station. He said, ‘Man, that's really something. That thing plays nice music.' He said, ‘You know what? I've got music at my hotel. It's a recorder.' It was a wire recorder. This was before tape. There were spools of wire and it worked the same way. He said, ‘I want to see if I can record music off your radio.' So we walk over to the Alexandria Hotel on 5th and Spring Street. That's where the fighters stayed, and I'm sure the wrestlers, too.

“So we go up to his room, and it's a two-room suite. He said, ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable.' And he brings out this wire recorder. And it's about the size of the cable box on your TV. And said, ‘Let's get some music on the radio.' And we recorded it and played it back and he was thrilled to pieces. He said, ‘I'm gonna get me one of those so I can record and blah blah blah.' And he asked what I do. I said, ‘Well, I represent frozen foods.' And he didn't understand what that was about. I said, ‘But what I really want to do is I want to be a boxing publicist. That's what I wanna be.'

“‘Ohhhh,' he says. ‘Publicity, huh? Let me show you something about publicity.'

“Do you know about
Seinfeld
reruns and Kramer's coffee table book that had legs and became a coffee table? So Ali comes out with a scrapbook that looks like Kramer's coffee-table book. The thing is about ten inches thick. Many
pages, and absolutely full. And he puts it down on the coffee table and he starts going through the pages with me.
Sports Illustrated, Sport Magazine, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune
. This book is full of clippings and cover stories—and this was 1962. He was just a young buck getting started. And he said, ‘Now this is publicity.' To say I was impressed, I can see the picture in my mind right now of all the clippings. It was unbelievable for a guy that young who wasn't a champion. It was Muhammad Ali.”

Later that year, Bill Caplan was hired as a part-time publicist for his boyhood hero, the long-retired heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Caplan went on to do publicity for virtually every major promoter in the game, including the feared and respected Aileen Eaton.

“In her time, it was so unusual for a woman to be in charge,” Caplan said. “Nowadays we'd call it a CEO. It was so unusual for her to be such a factor in a man's business. She had no background in it. She had no training. She just went in there after a very short time of watching those guys and going through the books in a day and a half confirmed that they were cheating the Los Angeles Athletic Club. She suddenly was running the show.”

Caplan went to work for George Parnassus, a former matchmaker at the Olympic who moved on to promote boxing once a week for Jack Kent Cooke at the Great Western Forum. In 1970, after two years on the job, Caplan had an altercation with Don Fraser, another publicity man at the Forum, over the truth. Caplan said he slugged Fraser in the chin. Fraser claimed they both got in good licks. Either way, Parnassus, a Greek immigrant, fired Caplan, who immediately dialed Don Chargin's office at the Olympic Auditorium.

“Bill was a heck of a PR guy, so I went to Aileen and said I have a heck of an idea of who we can get,” said Chargin, who served as matchmaker for the Olympic from 1963 through 1984. “She always knew what you were thinking and said, ‘Don't mention that name.' I said, ‘How do you know what I'm talking about?' She said, ‘You're talking about Bill Caplan.' I said, ‘Aileen, he's got five kids. He can do it.' They ended up being real good friends.”

Aileen Eaton is not without her critics. Don Fraser, who survived Caplan's haymaker to promote Ali's rematch with Ken Norton at the Forum in 1973, suggested the Boxing Hall of Famer receives more credit than she deserves for driving the sport in L.A. That's the minority opinion.

Eaton was regarded for selling stories, for finding a “hook” that interested people and got them in the building. As a result of Eaton's lost influence, attendance dwindled at the Olympic. The LeBell boys, Gene the fighter and Mike the pro wrestling promoter, eventually ended Friday night pro wrestling showcases in 1982, and Los Angeles no longer ranked near the nation's best wrestling or boxing town like it used to.

“If I needed a mother, she was there, and if I needed a business adviser, she was there,” Gene LeBell said around the time Eaton passed at the age of seventy-eight. “What can you say? She's my mother.”

Ferdie Pacheco, Ali's longtime physician, recoiled at the mere mention of Eaton's name. “An awful woman,” he moaned. “We called her the ‘Dragon Queen.'” Eaton, Pacheco said, attempted to dangle Ali around Los Angeles like a jewel
among Hollywood's constellation of stars. “As a boxing promoter and a woman: evil,” said Ali's doctor. “She controlled a lot of the boxing that went on because she had her tentacles in the mafia in Los Angeles. She ran boxing pretty strong. Some people lost fights they shouldn't have lost. Some people won 'em that shouldn't have won 'em. She wasn't a good person. She wasn't a bad person. She was a boxing person.”

The underworld and fight world were well intertwined throughout the U.S., and in L.A. they often intersected at the Olympic Auditorium. The influence of famed gangster Mickey Cohen, who himself participated in underground prizefights in L.A. in the late 1920s, was well known.

Cohen managed several boxers from the shadows, and would often treat LeBell to candy, Cokes, and hotdogs with not one but two dogs per bun. After one gangland altercation the five-foot-five media darling, dubbed “Public Nuisance No. 1,” was sent to recover at Cedars Hospital. LeBell happened to be there battling anemia, and, as the story goes, the teenager wandered over to Cohen's guarded room and startled police officers. One of Cohen's bodyguards vouched for the kid, who was allowed inside. LeBell, barely old enough to drive, chatted with the famous Jewish gangster as buckshot wounds soaked through his bandages.

Cohen would disappear for stretches of time, including a fifteen-year prison sentence in 1962 following his second conviction for tax evasion. When Cohen reappeared after ten years, he walked like a man that had suffered a stroke. After a fellow inmate cracked him in the head several times with a lead pipe, the tough guy was never the same. Cohen passed away in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-two, a month after Ali fought Inoki in Tokyo.

“I remember meeting some old man walking with a cane,” said Lennon Jr. “My dad would introduce me. Mickey rubbed the top of my head and called me ‘Lemon Head.' I saw him periodically at the Olympic. My dad also told the story of having dinner with my mom and Bugsy Siegel, and saying whatever you do don't calling him ‘Bugsy.'”

Boxing was in the early stages of working through blowback from the organized crime-supported International Boxing Club of New York era of the 1950s when Ali moved to the pro ranks. Congress, reacting to Supreme Court decisions around the International Boxing Club antitrust suits, spent nearly four decades attempting to establish protections for boxers. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 1998, for instance, focused partly on solving fighters' continued exploitation outside the ring, especially via coercive long-term contracts.